Getting marketing and sales on the same page is critical to your brand’s success.
This month, we were honored to attend a client’s 2022 sales kick off meeting in Orlando to see this practice of harmonizing marketing and sales in action. Being with our client in this setting reminded us that cross-functional teams are one of the keys to maximize growth for business success. Smart business leaders and collaborative relationships fuel us, so we wanted to share our top tips for helping marketing and sales work together for greater results.
Sales teams typically focus on talking directly to the customer. The sales process might take a very long time, but the sales team will discover useful information like solving a particular problem, or what pain points a potential customer runs into. These insights can be valuable, especially to the marketing team.
The marketing team approaches the customer in a somewhat different way – focusing on the brand. Increasing awareness of the brand and these brand conversations typically take the form of websites, content marketing, social media and email marketing and advertising.
Often sales and marketing groups seem to have different goals: but in reality their goal is the same – grow the business. They just approach it in different ways. When you harmonize marketing and sales strategies you reap the benefits of shared data on targets and prospects, shared communication, shared processes, and working together to solve challenges that arise.
Four ways to start bringing your sales, marketing and even finance teams together.
- Discuss with sales what marketing strategies and tools moved the needle in the previous year. Was it messaging, tactics and delivery? Something else? What did potential customers and clients respond to?
- Planning is key. Make sure that marketing is supporting sales strategies. The marketing team should review annual sales plans and have a meaningful discussion on how they can support the sales efforts.
- Agree on goals. Not just numbers and target customers, but the terminology. Are you speaking the same language? Using the same metrics and processes?
- Make sure the finance team is not developing forecasts in a silo. Communicate with them. Just because they can access the CRM does not mean they can create real projections.
Marketing is only as successful as sales; and sales is only as successful as marketing. Harmonize marketing and sales to work together to success. Working together is more important in 2022 than ever before. It is by working together in harmony, that the greater good can be achieved.